Contributing Writers

The families of two men from Trinidad killed in an October U.S. missile strike in the Caribbean are suing the Trump administration for wrongful death and extrajudicial killing. The families of 26-year-old Chad Joseph and 41-year-old Rishi Samaroo say the two men were returning home from fishing and farming in Venezuela, not smuggling drugs as the Trump administration has claimed without evidence. Four others on the same boat were also killed.

In the aftermath of the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, Venezuela has agreed to submit a monthly budget to the Trump administration, which will release money from an account funded by oil sales. It’s a deal for the interim government led by Delcy Rodriguéz that historian Greg Grandin calls “governing under the blade.” In a further shift away from the nation-building foreign policy of the past several decades of U.S.

We speak with Congressmember Delia Ramirez following an attack on her colleague, Congressmember Ilhan Omar, who was sprayed with an unknown foul-smelling liquid while speaking at a town hall event in Minneapolis on Tuesday. “This is a direct influence of what you’re seeing from this president,” Ramirez says, criticizing Trump’s policies and his long history of attacking Omar in particular.
Ramirez also discusses her efforts in Congress to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

ICE and CBP are using facial recognition technology to facilitate President Trump’s mass deportation campaign. With a smartphone app, immigration officers can scan faces of people they encounter and quickly search those faces against 200 million images stored in several government databases that are “notoriously error-filled,” according to Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.

Democracy Now! speaks with Congressmember LaMonica McIver of New Jersey, who is facing up to 17 years in prison stemming from an incident last May when she and two other Democratic congressmembers sought to inspect Delaney Hall, a private prison run by the GEO Group under contract with ICE. The federal government claims McIver assaulted an immigration officer. “I’m not going to let them bully me out of doing my job. I’m just not,” says McIver, who describes conditions at the prison as dismal.

Liam Ramos, the 5-year-old from Minnesota who was detained last week after coming home from preschool, is being held in the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas. Congressmembers who visited Liam report that has been depressed and hasn’t been eating well. Javier Hidalgo, legal director at RAICES, has worked with families at the detention center for years.

We speak with Congressmember Delia Ramirez following an attack on her colleague, Congressmember Ilhan Omar, who was sprayed with an unknown foul-smelling liquid while speaking at a town hall event in Minneapolis on Tuesday. “This is a direct influence of what you’re seeing from this president,” Ramirez says, criticizing Trump’s policies and his long history of attacking Omar in particular.
Ramirez also discusses her efforts in Congress to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

As President Trump shakes up the leadership of his immigration crackdown in Minnesota following the killing of ICU nurse Alex Pretti by Border Patrol agents, we examine the expanding role of the agency in interior enforcement.
Independent journalist Todd Miller says the Trump administration’s immigration operations in U.S. cities are an “extension” of “policies and practices that we’ve been seeing in the U.S.

Minnesota Congressmember Ilhan Omar was sprayed with an unknown liquid Tuesday during a town hall event in Minneapolis. Omar has long been a favorite target of President Donald Trump and his supporters, and the attack on her comes just days after Florida Congressmember Maxwell Frost was punched by a Trump supporter while attending the Sundance Film Festival.

As outrage grows across the country over the Trump administration’s deadly immigration crackdown in Minnesota, we speak with reporter Drew Harwell, who recently reported on the government’s effort to hire thousands more ICE agents.

Tens of thousands of Minnesotans braved the bitter cold in Minneapolis on Friday to demand ”ICE out.” The march was organized by faith and labor leaders and was accompanied by calls for an economic blackout. Seven hundred businesses reportedly closed in solidarity. Democracy Now!’s John Hamilton filed a report from the streets. John Reuss, an English teacher, said his students are afraid. “The fear is so tangible,” said Reuss. “If we do not shut it down right now, your city is next.

As calls grow to defund and abolish ICE, author Alec Karakatsanis warns that activists should take care to not fall for “copaganda,” which “takes ordinary people who are outraged over what’s happening and converts them into supporting meaningless reforms that actually don’t reduce the size or power or budget of these bureaucracies.” Karakatsanis is the author of Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News.

ICE is asserting federal immigration officers have the power to forcibly enter homes without a judicial warrant. “That’s just not true,” says legal scholar Stephen Vladeck, who says the claim directly violates the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. “What we’re really seeing here is an effort to twist a handful of old cases that have recognized circumstances in which the government doesn’t need a judicial warrant to enter a home.

A federal judge in Minnesota heard arguments Monday in a lawsuit filed by city and state officials to halt Trump’s deployment of thousands of federal immigration agents to Minnesota. “The federal government cannot coerce us into doing it their way,” says Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who is part of the group that brought the lawsuit.

Tens of thousands of Minnesotans braved the bitter cold in Minneapolis on Friday to demand ”ICE out.” The march was organized by faith and labor leaders and was accompanied by calls for an economic blackout. Seven hundred businesses reportedly closed in solidarity. Democracy Now!’s John Hamilton filed a report from the streets. John Reuss, an English teacher, said his students are afraid. “The fear is so tangible,” said Reuss. “If we do not shut it down right now, your city is next.

Civil rights attorney, minister and activist Nekima Levy Armstrong, who was arrested by federal officials for participating in an anti-ICE demonstration at Cities Church in St. Paul, was released from federal custody on Friday.

Democracy Now! speaks with a former colleague of Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old ICU nurse shot dead by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday. Dr. Aasma Shaukat, who hired Pretti for a research job over a decade ago, says he lived with “kindness, compassion and a strong sense of civic duty to help his fellow citizens.

Protests have intensified in Minnesota after federal immigration agents killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse who worked in the Minneapolis Veterans Health Care System, on Saturday. Democracy Now!’s John Hamilton reports from the scene of Pretti’s killing, where protesters clashed with federal agents. “We’ve seen everything from people that are unconscious, that have fainted, tear-gassed, bruised, bloody noses, can’t breathe,” said Melissa, a local resident.

Today marks the 50th anniversary of Paul Robeson’s death on January 23, 1976. The actor, singer, athlete and scholar was once famous around the world, but he was attacked, blacklisted and hounded by the government for his political beliefs.

Hundreds of businesses in Minnesota have closed for the day as part of an economic blackout to protest the surge of ICE agents into the state. Organizers of the strike include faith leaders and unions, who are encouraging people to stay home from work, school and shopping.